Crypto & DePIN

“We’re releasing a pilot in Q1 2024, ideally January… that’s going to massively bootstrap supply on Akash, and we have about $300 million in budget on chain for deploying these incentives.” — Greg Osuri, 00:32:24

“Learning from the mistakes of the previous generation DePIN projects, we learned that unless you validate demand, incentivizing supply will lead to wastage.” — Greg Osuri, 00:31:41

“Crypto is incentive on steroids, right? So that’s one key property of crypto that no other industry can give. And what can we do with the incentives in a supply constraint market? I think it’s going to be fascinating, right? It has never been done before for GPUs.” — Greg Osuri, 01:04:29

“So my prediction is with the Bitcoin ETF, you’re going to see more institutional adoption. What that means is more focus on fundamentals, more than speculation in terms of valuing an asset… if you have a capability to go long, you’ll also have a capability to go short… that is actually healthy in a way because it normalizes valuations.” — Greg Osuri, 00:46:08

“I looked at open core. Open core was not the solution. Token as open source software allows a sustainability model to open source that the world has never seen. So why? Because it moves the maintainability of a network away from a single corporation to the common… And for the first time we can have an open write database. Never before it was possible before crypto.” — Greg Osuri, 00:37:18

“One of the reasons why I’m doing crypto and blockchain is to have that legacy, like, to create something that will outlive me, the corporations that I built, or the people that I know.” — Greg Osuri, 00:18:08

“Semafor… wrote a piece on how crypto is saving AI. And they interviewed a lot of Akash’s users and providers… this was a college student from Columbia that got an A100 [on] Akash for like $1.10 or something like that… it just tells you that AI problems are solved with crypto. You know, the supply problems at least.” — Greg Osuri, 00:56:32

“In order to have pure open source software that’s sustainable, crypto is the answer. Right? Every other open source software [closes] at some point. If you do open core model, at some point it becomes closed because that’s the only way to make money… you cannot have closed source software and have verifiability.” — Greg Osuri, 00:58:04

“The moment you see a website geared towards investors, that’s generally a scam. Because you’re not focused on getting users… every time you see DePIN on a website, like front and center… DePIN didn’t exist six months ago… Close source is a scam, generally speaking. And when you have founders that come out of nowhere… generally [regard] them as a scam.” — Greg Osuri, 01:04:35

“I was the early Helium miner in 2019 — I bought a device for about $300 and I minted enough tokens to be worth about half a million dollars in about a year’s time. I’m the wrong type of person to be incentivized… that’s why it’s very challenging to design incentives. Akash is pre-incentives — the reason we have not launched incentives even though we have a huge budget is because incentive design is extremely, extremely hard.” — Greg Osuri, 00:21:28

“Crypto, if you think about it, it’s incredible at optimizing resources. It goes places where normal centralized software cannot… there’s a lot of GPUs that are just sitting idle in the world, so what better way for crypto to unlock that GPUs to come to the market — that’s what Akash is doing.” — Greg Osuri, 00:15:24

“We don’t need mergers… we build open systems, so we can build open systems on open systems. You don’t need a token merger or any other nonsense to work together… really open systems that are built to be open, permissionless, don’t need permission — you don’t need mergers, you don’t need partnerships.” — Greg Osuri, 00:45:47

“There are about a billion people in the world that don’t have credit cards, and that means they don’t have access to the cloud… it’s easy to see the future generation that’s unbanked, that’s getting used to using crypto as a primary way to pay for things, are going to be Akash users. It is the future, it is the next generation.” — Greg Osuri, 00:31:04

“I think IPs are more scarce than gold, think about it. It’d be cool to have an IP coin someday that’s backed by IP addresses… it’s a really scarce namespace, but Akash is a great place to get IP addresses.” — Greg Osuri, 00:10:49

“This space is so riddled with scams that we owe to ourselves to get rid of those scams. If we don’t self-regulate, the regulators will come and regulate us.” — Greg Osuri, 04:17:10

“If you want to create a truly decentralized system that’s extremely strong, can withstand state-level attacks… which is Bitcoin. So we’re actually looking at bringing Bitcoin security [to] Akash… I believe Bitcoin has to be the mother chain of the world.” — Greg Osuri, 01:00:16

“I think tokenized open [source] software, it’s going to be a third leg of open source business models… You have Red Hat which mastered the support model… then you have the open core model, which is Databricks being a popular one… but Akash is pure open source, there’s no commercial aspect… and I think the token [in] open source software, it’ll be a third leg in open source business models.” — Greg Osuri, 00:06:30

“I think AI is a killer use case for crypto. AI is the only one that could turn the press around from FTX. AI is the only one that’s turning the government around and embrace technology.” — Greg Osuri, 01:13:34

“I was on Capitol Hill earlier this week. I met with four senators, four congressmen on the AI caucus, and as well as the chair of the Financial Committee and the Commerce and Energy Committee… I was actually surprised that how many of them knew about [Akash]. One of the lead staffers of the Commerce Committee was like, yeah, [Akash] was like an intersection between [DePIN] and AI… We’re talking about the people that write policy.” — Greg Osuri, 00:45:42

“Does it need a token? I don’t think so, not yet… Bittensor is doing interesting work — Bittensor emissions are like billions of dollars per year, right? So those incentives are going to amazing folks that are doing open source AI and giving them a monetization mechanism.” — Greg Osuri, 00:15:09

“Akash is a radically new way to share compute. We wrote the white paper in 2018 — we talked about GPUs in 2018 but people didn’t pay attention. They think GPUs came in 2024.” — Greg Osuri, 00:10:45

“Akash doesn’t have verifiability, it has a reputation system, and Akash doesn’t have incentives because, well, we don’t have verification. What io.net did is they enabled incentives without verification — then you get Sybil attacks… that’s why we chose not to do incentives until we have verification.” — Greg Osuri, 00:19:41

“When we start doing block rewards, we’ll start incentivizing the properties that you want… you can create a configuration pool that says hey, we want a server in LA or New York… an incentivized pool to attract that particular compute… like Helium did it pretty well with network coverage. That way we can actually get the low-latency network.” — Greg Osuri, 00:33:58

“Traditional Web2 developers, AI developers that don’t interact with crypto are forced to buy crypto… we lose 95% of the users in that very step of getting AKT tokens. And thanks to the United States, zero regulation or lack of clarity with regulation, you cannot sell legally the tokens using a credit card on your website.” — Greg Osuri, 00:27:22

“I’m terrible at short-term predictions and usually good at long-term predictions… if the government continues to spend like a drunken sailor, I think scarce resources will definitely take like the center stage. Bitcoin is definitely turning out to be the hedge against this runaway inflation — considering that 30% of all the dollars in creation were done in the last three years.” — Greg Osuri, 00:03:41

“All these traditional systems that were very hard to disrupt are getting disrupted… this is only happening in crypto, and I think that is going to put us in a center stage when it comes to the mainstream audience, than DeFi.” — Greg Osuri, 00:44:01

“If Apple comes up and says we can leverage the secure enclave to store your private keys, and you can transfer those keys to other devices in an encrypted manner… and we let you use your credit card to onboard… I think that’ll change the game forever.” — Greg Osuri, 00:22:26

“I’m terrible at short-term predictions and usually good at long-term predictions… if the government continues to spend like a drunken sailor, I think scarce resources will definitely take like the center stage. Bitcoin is definitely turning out to be the hedge against this runaway inflation — considering that 30% of all the dollars in creation were done in the last three years.” — Greg Osuri, 00:03:41

“When you incentivize in the token that’s native to your platform, that token tends to be a volatile token, and then incentive distribution happens to be irregular and doesn’t really make sense, because you’re most probably likely incentivizing real-world assets like a GPU or a CPU, which are priced in US dollars and not priced in your token.” — Greg Osuri, 00:07:23

“Akash hasn’t enabled incentives on chain yet, and the reason for that is you do not want to have incentives without verification… we saw recently with another network that enabled incentives without verification — they got Sybil attacked to death. Sybil attacks are very, very real; every time there is money on the line, you want verification.” — Greg Osuri, 00:04:27

“We are at a product market fit stage for GPUs. And we have real usage. We have about, say, 50 [percent] overall utilization, and I believe 60 to 70 percent utilization for high density GPUs… a lot of the other networks that have launched just throw the towel and see what happens. But their utilizations are less than 1%.” — Greg Osuri, 00:08:45

“The current system… proof of stake… is heavily focused on capital as the stake, but I think we definitely need to rethink some of these systems where the stake is not necessarily capital but actual participation in the network… you could tokenize usage, you could tokenize attention… systems should be governed by the people that use it, and people that have significantly higher involvement by using the system should have a higher say.” — Greg Osuri, 00:23:41

“Cosmos is, in my opinion, the only layer one app chain framework that works without an issue. Akash is a prime example — we’ve been live for about four years and we haven’t had a single unplanned outage… we grew our usage maybe by order of magnitude every year.” — Greg Osuri, 00:02:53

“The challenge is how do you keep the weights private but keep the model open, and I think that’s being solved. And once you solve that, now you have an incentive mechanism to incentivize ownership of a model, and I think that’s going to kick-start a whole new revolution.” — Greg Osuri, 00:29:09

“Bitcoin has been primarily a money chain till now. But what Babylon is doing is transitioning Bitcoin from a money chain into a chain that can be a lot more useful for powering applications.” — Greg Osuri, 00:04:11

“If there’s a way to bridge the Bitcoin security or really bring Bitcoin security to Akash and even enable payments using Bitcoin for using machine learning on Akash, I think that will be an incredible milestone in improving… the security of Akash network to a level that can withstand a nation state attack. And that’s very important when you’re building an unstoppable cloud.” — Greg Osuri, 00:00:50

“Just from the introduction of GPUs — we introduced GPUs in last year August — and today our revenue on a year-over-year basis gained by 1700%… this month alone we grew 100% in terms of earnings compared to last month. So it’s very clear that there is product-market fit… and we did it without taking shortcuts, being open source, being decentralized.” — Greg Osuri, 00:34:36

“DePIN in a way is a savior to crypto… with DePIN [you] can be like, hey, you want GPUs? … you pay a dollar for [an] H100 where you pay $4 on Amazon — that’s very quantifiable… I think DePIN is a savior to crypto. We don’t talk much about it; it will be talked about more over the next year, I think, for sure.” — Greg Osuri, 00:36:49

“$200,000.” — Greg Osuri, 01:08:18

“That’s why you want open source as a foundation for decentralization, and I will reject any notion that a closed system is decentralized — it’s just not a reality. And it’s really sad what’s happening [in] DePIN today, that there are a lot of these networks just popping out of nowhere with fully closed source code bases, and the justification is ‘decentralization is a spectrum.’ Yes, decentralization is a spectrum, but the spectrum begins with the open source code base and ends with energy sourcing.” — Greg Osuri, 00:15:12

“Akash is the first one, so we set the standard. We also created this new category called DePIN — DePIN did not exist before Akash… we grew about 1700% year over year in user fees, we doubled our workloads in a year.” — Greg Osuri, 00:00:45